Why Obama shouldn’t follow Cheney’s fitness routine
January 29, 2009 29 comments
In a gibberingly egregious article speculating about how the new President will handle the TWAT, Newsweek says that the Cheney-Bush regime was unfairly criticized for its approach:
The flaw of the Bush-Cheney administration may have been less in what it did than in the way it did it — flaunting executive power, ignoring Congress, showing scorn for anyone who waved the banner of civil liberties.
Right… So, for instance, torturing people was fine, they just shouldn’t have been so obstreperous about it? Well, y’know…
The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems.
Really? Is it?
Waterboarding — simulating drowning by pouring water over the suspect’s mouth and nostrils — is a brutal interrogation method.
It’s not “simulating drowning”, it is drowning, just stopping before the victim’s death.
But by some (disputed) accounts, it was CIA waterboarding that got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk.
It was CIA forced partial drowning that “got” KSM to “confess” to plotting to bomb a bank that didn’t exist until three years after he was arrested.
It is a liberal shibboleth that torture doesn’t work — that suspects will say anything, including lies, to stop the pain. But the reality is perhaps less clear.
Perhaps less clear. And our evidence is… er… say, are you following the new season of 24? (By the way, try saying “liberal shibboleth” very quickly, ten times in a row. Fun, huh?)
As president, Obama may want to preserve some flexibility. (Suppose, for instance, that after a big attack the CIA captured the leader who planned it; there would be enormous pressure to make the terrorist divulge what attack is coming next.)
Sure, Obama might want to preserve some flexibility by torturing the “leader” who “planned” a “big attack”. On the other hand, he might want to preserve some flexibility by doing yoga, or perhaps studying the Feldenkrais method. After all, Cheney’s chosen exercise regime of torturing all and sundry doesn’t seem to have panned out too well.
What are your favourite methods for preserving some flexibility, readers?
29 comments
Is our readers learning?
January 22, 2009 29 comments
Do you feel proactive when you consult a reference work? Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica,thinks you should:
What we are trying to do is shifting … to a much more proactive role for the user and reader where the reader is not only going to learn from reading the article but by modifying the article and – importantly – by maybe creating his own content or her own content
The reader is going to “learn… by modifying”? So the people modifying the articles don’t actually need to know anything about the subject before they start modifying? The modifying itself is supposed to be the way they learn? That’s “proactive”! ((But what, dear readers, does the horrible term “proactive” actually add to the sense of, um, “active”?)) Oh, but luckily, edits won’t go live until approved by “one of the company’s staff or freelance editors”. I suppose they can always check whether the new material looks correct by, er, going to Wikipedia. ((I confess that I have never edited my own Wikipedia article so as to make myself look more important and central to the critical intellectual debates of our time, etc. Do you think I should?))
But it ill behoves me to carp at this exciting news. We can at least be very confident that, in time, Britannica will become a much more reliable source of information than it has hitherto been about old videogames and science-fiction TV series. Everybody wins!
29 comments
Immaculate conceivings
January 18, 2009 22 comments
University College London announces:
The first baby tested preconceptionally for a genetic form of breast cancer (BRCA1) has been born.
William Saletan at Slate:
[L]et’s take a closer look at the announcement, starting with the test “before conception.” This baby was tested as an embryo in a dish. She was one of 11 such embryos made by injecting drugs in the mother to stimulate production of excess eggs, which were then fertilized with the father’s sperm. Six of the embryos had the gene for breast cancer. Three more had “other abnormalities.” All nine were “discarded.” The other two were implanted, and one became this baby.
In sum, at least six human embryos were made and then thrown away because they failed a test. We now call such tests “preconception.” This is the next step in our gradual devaluation of embryos. First, we said IVF embryos weren’t pregnancies. That’s technically correct: Pregnancy begins when the embryo implants in the womb. Then we called early embryos “pre-embryos” so we could dismantle them to get stem cells. That was technically incorrect, but we did it because it made us feel better. Now we’re adjusting the word conception. Henceforth, testing of IVF embryos to decide which will live or die is preconception. Don’t fret about the six eggs we fertilized, rejected, and flushed in selecting this baby. They were never really conceived. In fact, they weren’t embryos. According to Serhal, each was just “an affected cluster of cells.”
Saletan’s outrage at the apparent “adjusting of the word conception” here seems to depend on the assumption (natural enough) that “conception” occurs at fertilization. However (I Am Not a Fertility Scientist), it seems as though he is somewhat late to the party in complaining about the “adjusting” of the word, since the medical meaning of “conception” changed from what he and I find intuitive more than 40 years ago. Since the mid-1960s, “conception” has been defined as the implantation of the blastocyst rather than its initial formation. Obviously the UCL team is using “conception” in that sense, so there is no absurdity in their story of preconception embryo testing.
Was the change in the meaning of “conception” that occurred in the 1960s itself argumentative, politically as well as scientifically motivated? It looks that way. ((Wikipedia has a Dr Bent Boving saying in 1959: “the social advantage of being considered to prevent conception rather than to destroy an established pregnancy could depend on something so simple as a prudent habit of speech” — which makes my Unspeak antennae vibrate; but I’d like to know more.)) Is it important to keep tabs on such linguistic changes? Definitely. (I like what Saletan subsequently does with the word “inflicting”.) On the other hand, Saletan is going a bit far to claim that anyone is trying to Unspeak the very existence of embryos, which he does by the sleight of hand of linking to a Daily Mail story: the original UCL press release clearly says “embryos”.
And is he perhaps a little too quick to turn this into a scare story about those crazy eugenicist scientists riding roughshod over “conscience” and “the truth”?
22 comments
Apocalypse-averting calculus
January 9, 2009 6 comments
Philosopher Michael Walzer gives us the benefit of his soothing wisdom on Gaza. ((Via Aaronovitch Watch.)) His main “argument” as such is that discussions of what is or is not “disproportionate” in war are unreliable because they are necessarily forward-looking and speculative. Wait: make that unreliable unless Walzer himself is making them:
Israel’s Gaza war was called “disproportionate” on day one, before anyone knew very much about how many people had been killed or who they were. ((But what about calling something “disproportionate” after you know for sure that hundreds of people have been killed and lots of them weren’t fighting you? Who cares, right? Let’s concentrate on looking ahead, lest the sight of blood behind us offend our delicate philosophical sensibilities.)) The standard proportionality argument, looking ahead as these arguments rightly do, would come from the other side. Before the six months of cease-fire (when the fire never ceased), Hamas had only primitive and home-made rockets that could hit nearby small towns in Israel. By the end of the six months, they had far more advanced rockets, no longer home-made, that can hit cities 30 or 40 kilometers away. Another six months of the same kind of cease-fire, which is what many nations at the UN demanded, and Hamas would have rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv. And this is an organization explicitly committed to the destruction of Israel. How many civilian casualties are “not disproportionate to” the value of avoiding the rocketing of Tel Aviv? How many civilian casualties would America’s leaders think were “not disproportionate to” the value of avoiding the rocketing of New York?
We linger on that for a moment, as Walzer no doubt intends us to, before reading on:
The answer, again, is too many. We have to make proportionality calculations, but those calculations won’t provide the most important moral limits on warfare.
Yet coincidentally, the other “moral limits on warfare” he goes on to discuss (significantly more hastily than the less “important” argument about disproportionality, which he has nonetheless expended some effort trying to win) turn out not to imply any criticism of Israel’s recent actions at all, but serve as well to illustrate how it’s all Hamas’s fault.
I feel an illustrative nanodrama coming on.
PRESIDENT HUHFUHRR: (Looking into camera from behind a mahogany desk, on which rests a CRYSTAL BALL that he is rubbing gently.)
My fellow liberal democrats, I say to you tonight that we must bomb the living shit out of Terroristia because, given the combination of bloodthirsty ideology and excellent education that prevails there, all its children will inevitably grow up to become genius scientists who hate our freedoms, and in the course of things they will naturally invent a superweapon and use it to blow up the entire Planet Earth.
(He pauses to let the enormity of this scenario sink in to the loyal citizenry.)
That being so, our terrorist-loving critics can hardly call our plan to incinerate a million of Terroristia’s toddlers tomorrow “disproportionate” to the value of saving the entire human race!
(He allows an expression of sadness for the regrettable deaths of a million toddlers to pass across his face, before recomposing his features into a glare of heroic resolution.)
(There is a NOISE, and then PROFESSOR URANU shuffles onto camera at HUHFUHRR’s left and fidgets.)
HUHFUHRR: Ah! Professor Uranu! Our liberal democracy’s most eminent just-war theorist! I was just explaining to the people our plan.
URANU: (nervously) Yes, well, I think there’s a bit of a problem with it. A million toddlers is too many.
HUHFUHRR: Too many?
URANU: That’s right. Though of course you are entirely accurate, and let me say frightening, in your prediction as to what will happen if we don’t do anything.
HUHFUHRR: So we are right to incinerate a certain amount of toddlers, just not a million?
URANU: That sounds very reasonable, Mr President.
HUHFUHRR: How many, then?
URANU: Eh?
HUHFUHRR: Give me a number, man! You aren’t the kind of squeamish terrorist-lover who would cravenly claim that incinerating any number of toddlers at all is wrong?
URANU: (drawing himself more erect) Of course not!
HUHFUHRR: So how many?
(URANU thinks, counting on his fingers.)
URANU: (shrugging) Half a million?
HUHFUHRR: Splendid! I will tell the generals.
URANU: (holding up one finger) There are other limits on warfare, too, Mr President.
HUHFUHRR: Oh?
URANU: For instance, have we tried other means to our end?
HUHFURHH: Well, some others. Of course we haven’t negotiated with the bastards but —
URANU: (quickly) That’s all right then. Second, who is responsible for putting civilians in the line of fire?
HUHFURHH: (outraged) Obviously they are, since they’re going to teach their children to build a planet-busting doomsday weapon!
URANU: Excellent point, Mr President. Thirdly, are we acting in concrete ways to minimize the risks we impose on civilians?
HUHFURRH: Sure, we’re only targeting the young children. Anyone older won’t have time to become a genius scientist and invent the Armageddon bomb.
URANU: A wise answer, Mr President. That was a hard question anyway, given that we have to take into account the world-liquidating intentions of everyone in Terroristia.
(URANU reaches to lay a hand on PRESIDENT HUHFURRH’s shoulder, then thinks better of it, and tries to make it look as though he just wanted to stretch his arm. HUHFURRH stares at him, and then shakes his head.)
HUHFURRH: So, Professor, is that it?
URANU: Indeed it is! (He peers down into the CRYSTAL BALL and adjusts his bow tie, then clears his throat.) I give you my authoritative judgment that no one has the right to criticise this war of ours.
HUHFURRH: (beaming insanely into camera) Good night, and God bless just-war theorists!
(Fade, to the musical accompaniment of Nik Kershaw’s “I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me”.)
6 comments
Automatic warfare
January 7, 2009 20 comments
As a kind of footnote to Unintended, let us observe how it is sometimes possible to go one better and deny that the actor of whom one approves has any agency at all. George W. Bush is quoted by AP as having said yesterday:
The situation now taking place in Gaza was caused by Hamas.
This only makes any sense if one thinks of Israel’s planners as utterly incapable of choosing to do otherwise, void of volition, bereft of any intention whatsoever. ((It is also, by the way, why I don’t buy accounts of the Kosovo war that run something like: “Nato’s bombing actually caused an increase in Serbian atrocities.” The poor little Serb commanders, this implies, had no choice in the matter themselves. It follows too, of course, that any claim such as “Hamas’s firing rockets into Israel was caused by Israeli oppression etc” is equally nonsensical.)) Further, since Israel’s action is an effect of a cause, thus a necessary result having the force of natural law, it must also follow that it comes as an inevitable consequence of something that Hamas did first, ie by implication their alleged breaking of the ceasefire in November ((Although if they did break it, it was only after Israel struck first — but then we know that ceasefires are peculiarly asymmetrical in their robustness to action by one side or the other.)) — even though Israel’s leaders had already been planning the attack for months previously.
In exploiting this efficient dual-use parcel of Unspeak, however, note that one must be circumspect about characterizing what Bush carefully calls “the situation now taking place in Gaza”. If, for example, one were attempt to claim that “Israel’s blowing up of UN schools in Gaza was caused by Hamas”, the absurdity of it would be plainer. ((IDF spokesmen do say that they blew up the UN schools (in which civilians were sheltering) because Hamas fighters were or had been firing from them, but they do not claim they had no choice but to blow up the schools.)) So I think we can all congratulate Bush, one last time, on his verbal delicacy.
20 comments
